Orinoco Tribune, April 6, 2024 —Iranian police arrested on 6 April a senior ISIS operative and two other members of the group accused of planning a suicide attack during the upcoming Eid al-Fitr celebrations for the end of Ramadan.
The police arrested Mohammad Zaker, known as “Ramesh,” and the men following a gunbattle in Karaj, west of the capital, Tehran.
The arrests come after Iranian security forces battled militants from Jaish al-Adl, a separatist ethnic Baluch group, for nearly 17 hours on Thursday. Gunbattles with the militant group, which has received support from the US and Israel in the past, left ten security officers and 18 militants dead.
The US and Israel have been accused of using ISIS and other extremist groups as proxies to attack their enemies in the past, including toppling the Syrian and Iraqi governments between 2013 and 2015.
Last month, an ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan claimed credit for an attack on a Moscow theatre in which gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons at concertgoers, killing at least 144 people.
ISIS claimed responsibility for a dual suicide attack in January that killed nearly 100 Iranian pilgrims in the southeastern Iranian city of Kerman. The pilgrims were mourning the death of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by a US drone strike in 2020.
ISIS took responsibility for a 2022 attack on a Shia shrine in Iran that killed 15 people and for twin bombings in 2017 that targeted Iran’s parliament and the tomb of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.